Chapter Five
“Have you come to stare at me through the window, or do you mean to actually come inside?”
Cillian, who had been standing across the street from Mrs Bramble’s boarding house for the better part of ten minutes, doing precisely what he had been accused of doing, straightened his shoulders and crossed the road.
He had slept badly. This was unremarkable in itself, since he had slept badly every night for two years, but the texture of the sleeplessness had been different.
Usually, he lay awake because his mind replayed things he wished to forget: sounds and images from the Peninsula surfacing in the dark like debris rising from a wreck.
Last night had been given over, almost entirely, to drafting and discarding the same letter to Gerald. Twice, he had nearly gone down in search of pen and paper. Twice, all the adequate reasons for returning to his perfectly adequate life had failed to outweigh a single sentence.
I am not going to stand in a church and promise to obey a man who looks at me as one looks at something one intends to break
The thought of returning to his drainage report after that had felt, for the first time, like the cowardice it was.
So, he was here, standing outside a boarding house at eight o’clock in the morning, being scolded by a woman he had met the previous afternoon.
Mrs Bramble admitted him without further commentary and pointed him towards the parlour, where Molly Granger was sitting on the rug before the fire, still in a borrowed morning wrapper, with Wellington in her lap, attempting to teach him to retrieve a small ball of yarn.
“Fetch, Wellington. Fetch. It is very simple. The ball goes there, you go there, you bring it back here. Cats in novels do this all the time.”
Wellington regarded the yarn ball with blank contempt.
“He won’t do it,” Molly observed, without lifting her gaze. “Because he is a stubborn animal who lacks ambition.”
“Miss Granger.”
She looked up.
The morning light from the window fell across her face, catching the curve of her jaw and the loose curl that had fallen against her temple.
Cillian’s gaze lingered on that curl for a fraction of a second longer than it ought before he redirected it to the bookshelf behind her, deliberate as a man adjusting his aim.
“Lord Harrowden.” She did not get up or smile. She sat on the rug with the cat in her lap and watched him as one watches an approaching army: aware of the threat, with no intention of surrender. “I shut the door on you yesterday.”
“So you did.”
“Most people would interpret that as a definitive conclusion to the conversation.”
“I am not most people.”
“No. Most people go home when they are told to.” She stroked the cat’s ears, casually on the surface, very obviously steadying herself beneath. “Why are you still in Bath?”
“Because you have not given me reason to believe you are safe.”
“I am safe.” She kept her hand on the cat’s back, his slow purr a metronome beneath her words. “I am in a boarding house with a locked door and an extremely judgmental cat. I am safer here than I have been in months.”
He took the chair nearest the fire, opposite her.
Experience had taught him the value of patience. Silence, properly used, could draw more from a person than any number of questions. If one waited long enough, most people hurried to fill the space themselves.
Molly Granger, as it happened, did not require silence as an inducement to speak. She required only a few seconds of it before the discomfort drove her to fill the gap.
“I know what you are doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“You are sitting there being quiet on purpose because you think I shall talk myself into going home if you wait long enough. My father does the same thing. It does not work. Silence makes me nervous, and nervousness makes me talk, but talking does not make me change my mind. It only means you will know a great deal more about my views on my Turkish prison novel before I refuse you again.”
“I have asked no such thing,” Cillian said.
He did not move from the chair. He did not lean forward. He kept his hands open on his knees, as one does with a fox that has not yet decided whether to bolt.
“You are asking by being here.” Molly’s chin lifted half an inch, as it had in the doorway the day before. “Your presence is the question. And the answer is no.”
Cillian leaned back in the chair and studied her.
She was remarkable, in a way he had not expected and was not entirely prepared for.
She sat on a rug in a borrowed wrapper with an uncooperative cat and a bandaged ankle, possessing nothing in the world except a travelling-bag full of poor decisions, and yet she was holding her ground against an earl with the calm tenacity of a soldier defending a position he had no intention of yielding.
“Tell me about Lord Vyne,” he said.
The change was immediate. The cheerfulness flickered, a candle caught in a sudden draught, then steadied again. But the steadiness cost her something. Her fingers tightened in the cat’s fur, and he could see the effort it took.
“Why?”
“Because I was sent to bring you home to marry him, and I would like to understand what I am bringing you home to.”
“You are bringing me home to nothing. I am not going.”
“Humour me.”
Her eyes held his for a long moment. Something was happening behind them: a calculation, a weighing, the rapid assessment he had seen soldiers make in the field when deciding whether to trust a stranger with information that might save or destroy them.
“Have you ever met Lord Vyne?” she asked.
“I have not had that pleasure.”
“It is not a pleasure.” She set the cat aside, and Wellington stalked off, affronted, to resume his post on the windowsill.
Molly drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, making herself smaller, and Cillian recognised the posture. He had seen it in soldiers who had been held prisoner and civilians who had survived sieges. The posture of a person who had learned to take up as little space as possible.
“He is one-and-sixty,” she said, the words coming carefully, as one might lay out a list of charges. “Wealthy. Respected. He has excellent manners and a beautiful house and the kind of reputation that makes people say, What a fine gentleman, when he enters a room.”
A long breath, slow.
“And he looks at me the way a man looks at a horse he is considering buying. He looks at my face and my hands and the way I move, and I can feel him deciding what he will keep, and what he will change, and what he will simply… remove.”
Her voice was steady.
Her hands were not.
“He told my father, in front of me, as if I were a portrait on the wall, that he admires my spirit.” She handled the word like glass. “He said he looks forward to settling me.”
The word landed in the parlour like a stone dropped into still water.
Settling, in the mouth of a man who used language precisely, was a promise: to take something restless and alive and make it smaller, quieter, less, until it fit the shape he had prepared.
“I am not a problem to be managed,” Molly said.
“Or a fire to be banked. I am a person, and I have a voice, and I have been using it my entire life because my mother taught me that silence is where one hides, and noise is where one lives. Lord Vyne wants to put me in a silent house and close the door.”
She watched him.
The bravado was gone, and the performance with it. What remained was the girl herself, sitting on the rug with her arms around her knees, her bandaged ankle tucked awkwardly to one side, the truth of it written across her face in a language that required no translation.
“I would rather live in this boarding house and wash dishes for the rest of my life than marry that man. So please, go back to Somerset. For I shall not let you carry me home.”
Cillian did not respond at once. He sat in the chair and watched the fire, aware of something moving inside his chest that he could not name and did not care to examine.
Examination would require acknowledgement, and acknowledgement would require admitting that the carefully maintained numbness he had spent two years constructing had developed a crack.
A crack in the very particular shape of a girl in a borrowed wrapper who could not stop talking.
The word settling remained in the parlour, heavy as a verdict.
Behind it sat the flat, patient eyes Molly had described; behind those, the way she had made herself small in the act of describing them.
There were many ways to break a person that had nothing to do with war.
He thought, briefly, of his own silence, of how the Peninsula had stripped him down to function and efficiency, and how easy it would be to return to that quiet now and call it peace.
He could almost hear Jennings, clear as a bell.
Be patient with her.
“I am not going to carry you home,” he said.
Molly blinked at him. Her arms loosened a fraction around her knees. On the windowsill, Wellington registered the change in the room and lifted his head.
“But I am not leaving Bath until this is resolved.”
Cillian rested his forearms on his thighs, the careful posture of a man who had decided to stop pretending he commanded the conversation.
“Resolved how?” she asked, watching him with new wariness.
“I have not determined that yet.”
“That is not especially reassuring.” The corner of her mouth twitched, almost amused, before she remembered she was not yet ready to be.
“Miss Granger.” He met her eyes, deliberately. “You climbed out of a window with no money, no plan, and one mismatched shoe. You are not in a position to lecture anyone on the inadequacy of their preparations.”
Her face changed. It was not quite a smile, not quite relief, but some small easing of the tension she had been holding so fiercely, as if she had braced for a blow and received, instead, an answer she did not quite know what to do with.
“Then we are both remarkably ill-prepared,” she said.
“So it would appear.”
“I wager you loathe the fact.”
“Exceedingly.”
Another near-smile touched her mouth. “This will be unpleasant for both of us.”
“So I expect.”
They held each other’s gaze. The fire cracked. Wellington yawned from the windowsill, vast and pink and editorial.
Molly unfolded herself from the rug and stood, wincing on her ankle. Cillian was on his feet before he had made the conscious decision to stand, his hand half-extended towards her elbow before he caught himself and let it fall.
The instinct had been automatic. The soldier’s reflex. The body’s response to someone in difficulty before the mind could intervene.
But the gesture had brought him close to her, closer than he had been before, close enough to notice the way the morning light turned the loose curl at her temple to dark copper.
He was aware, with uncomfortable specificity, of the scent of soap and lavender clinging to her from Mrs Bramble’s linens.
He stepped back.
She watched him do it.
Something passed between them in that step: an acknowledgement of proximity too sudden, too soon, and too laden with implications neither of them was prepared to name.
“So, you are staying,” she said. It was not a question.
“I am staying.”
“For how long?”
“Until I understand what to do about this.”
“This being my life, which is not yours to do anything about.”
“This being a situation in which a young lady has fled a dangerous man, and now finds herself in a boarding house with no money, no protection, and no certain prospect, while I have been asked to help by her father.” He paused.
“A request which, as I am sure you have gathered, I am choosing to interpret rather more broadly than he intended.”
Molly held his gaze longer than she had held anyone’s without speaking in recent memory, and the silence between them was not the sort she usually rushed to fill.
It was the kind of silence that felt like a held breath, like the space between a question and an answer, like the moment before one steps from a ledge and discovers whether the ground beneath is solid.
“You are a very strange man, Lord Harrowden.”
“So I have been told.”
“I was not expecting you.”
“I was not expecting you either, Miss Granger.”
She turned away and limped towards the stairs. At the foot of them, she paused, looked back over her shoulder, and the girl who never stopped talking said only three words.
“Thank you, Cillian.”
His given name.
In every drawing room he had ever entered, a young unmarried woman of good family used a man’s title and surname unless he was a relation or her affianced.
There were rules about such things, written and unwritten, and Molly Granger had just stepped over one as if she had never noticed it was drawn.
Their brief acquaintance hardly allowed for such a liberty. He should correct her.
Cillian belonged to his brother, to the men who had shouted it across a Spanish dawn. Coming from her, in a parlour smelling of lavender, it landed somewhere it had no business going.
He did not correct her.
He stood in the parlour and listened to her uneven footsteps ascending the stairs. The crack in his numbness widened by a fraction.
Mrs Bramble appeared in the kitchen doorway with a fresh pot of tea and a look that suggested she had heard every word and was reserving judgment for the time being.
“Tea, my lord?”
“Please.”
She poured for him. He sat down, and Wellington came and jumped to his lap uninvited, settling there with imperious weight.
Cillian drank his tea in the quiet parlour, with a cat he had not asked for, in a city he did not care about, because a girl in a borrowed wrapper had called him by his name and he had felt it in places he had believed permanently dark.
Outside the window, Bath continued as though nothing of consequence had altered.
Cillian had no idea what he was going to do next.
He only knew he was not going back to Somerset. Not yet.